Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the man and his deepening horror at what they have done. She winds and unwinds her hair--was it so that he once liked it? But he cannot look; he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those breasts of yours," if this thing could be undone. It is not the mere killing--though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to fondle her as before--but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." . . . _This_ is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"-- "One must be venturous and fortunate:-- What is one young for else?" and thus their passion is justified; but to have killed the man who rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife . . . why-- ". . . He gave me Life, nothing less"-- and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he no right after all--what was there to wonder at? "He sat by us at table quietly: _Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?_" In that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of Sebald as at this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now "feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again, at this hour it is) reveals itself--callous but courageous, proud and passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil--her answer strikes a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say. She replies that she loves him better now than ever-- "And best (_look at me while I speak to you_) Best for the crime." She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off-- ". . . this naked crime of ours May not now be looked over: look it down." And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the past? "Give up that noon I owned my love for you?" --and as, in her impassioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on--the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no less lustful, receptivity of his--and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods," while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," they lay quiescent, till the storm came--